Earlier this month, reports emerged that the State Department is indirectly bankrolling a "disinformation" monitoring group that has targeted non-liberal and conservative news organizations. Now, a former special adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s State Department says financial support for the program needs to be shut down.
"Programs like this continue until there is pushback on the government’s partisan activities," POLARIS National Security executive director Gabriel Noronha, told Fox News Digital.
Pushback came when the Washington Examiner reported a British organization called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) with ties to a pair of American nonprofits is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged "disinformation."
"There is no good reason for there to be continued support for this organization now that this kind of activity has come to light," Noronha said. The question, simply, is do they feel enough political pressure to do the right thing?"
Noronha served as Special Adviser for the Iran Action Group at the U.S. Department of State from 2019 to 2021, where he also supervised all Iran-related grants.
The Examiner reported the group "has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government" and is "likely costing the [censored] news organizations vital advertising dollars."
The State Department has told Fox News Digital that the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) work with GDI was limited to disinformation efforts in East Asia and Europe, and the Global Engagement Center does not moderate content on social media platforms. It said the role of the GEC is to identify foreign state and non-state disinformation narratives and trends that can undermine or influence the policies of the U.S. and its allies and partner nations.
"The State Department and the Global Engagement Center have a mission to fight foreign disinformation and spread messages supporting American democracy to global audiences. However, there is a tight firewall imposed by Congress that prohibit this messaging and efforts from being directed at American domestic audiences," Noronha told Fox News Digital.
"The issue is that U.S. taxpayer dollars should never be going to promote or silence internal domestic views. That's not the role of the U.S. government to play favorites with speech," he continued. "So, when the United States provides support to programs it is supposed to take every effort to ensure that no taxpayer dollars are going to use to influence domestic news. That is the clear expectation for grantees as well. In this case, a grantee is being subsidized by taxpayers while it simultaneously engaged in efforts to silence and censor conservative news outlets and alternative points of view."
Noronha feels that GDI might be fighting foreign disinformation, "but they're also engaged in trying to silence conservative viewpoints in the U.S."
GDI has also identified the 10 "riskiest" news organizations, which includes the New York Post, who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story that was censored by Big Tech outlets and falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation in some media outlets. The laptop has since been authenticated by a variety of news organizations and Hunter Biden’s own attorney essentially owned up to it earlier this year before backtracking.
RealClearPolitics, Reason and the Federalist are also among the websites named by the GDI as risky.
"Such an organization should not be approved for any work with the U.S. government," Noronha said.
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Noronha said it’s important to note that the organization started receiving U.S. assistance in 2018 under a Republican administration, and most of the grants are executed by career civil servants as opposed to political appointees.
"The issue is that career civil servants need to be thoroughly and continuously vetting these organizations, so we are able to cut off funding whoever there is evidence of partisan activism by these organizations," he said, adding that government employees may not have been plotting to stifle viewpoints, but they need to be aware that it’s happening.
"All financial support needs to be suspended right now," Noronha said.
